The science around addiction is much more advanced in 2026 than it was when many of us were kids and teens. Companies are much better at designing things in a way meant to artificially stimulate dopamine and things like that well above and beyond what normies can handle.

There is also a distinct difference between this sort of behavior and just selling something that is commonly known to be literally addicting like booze and drugs. Risking an addiction, with something known to be highly addicting, is different than just using software and finding out it was deliberately designed with dark patterns to trigger addiction in the average user.

Palmer Luckey explained it well in this interview. In any real war, we'll have to outsource a lot of production of weapons to our automotive sector like we did in WWII. The MIC is FUBAR that they're talking literal years before we can replace the interceptors we've spammed on Russia and Iran. In a real war with China, we'd need to replace that in a few weeks.

If Musk is correct, Altman carried out probably the worst case of fraud against a non-profit and its donors in American history. If he has a case, we should all hope Musk not only flays Altman's finances alive in court, but gets something rolling where Altman faces serious criminal charges for doing a bait-and-switch.

Their "but but security" arguments were atrociously insulting to intelligence. The vast majority of even government and corporate employees will never face an issue where there is a justification for "protecting them" from someone disassembling an iPhone and sneaking compromised components into the device. Those that have to worry about that have entire corporate and government security departments focused on actively providing countermeasures to ensure the employee doesn't create an opening into the infrastructure when they're abroad.

$54B to traditional MIC companies is a hard sell. They should instead drop a few billion in purchases and R&D grants on Anduril to see if they can really scale up as hoped. Anduril's approach is a lot more like China and Iran where they don't rely on fancy Western style MIC manufacturing and build platforms that are designed to be constructed with civilian manufacturing facilities.

That's why Iran is such a menace to Ukraine, Israel and the US. They can build loads of dirt cheap suicide drones that are plenty good enough to soak up our interceptors and swarm on our installations afterward.

A loot box may have nothing.

A quick search on Google and Gemini responded that you're wrong on this with Valve games. They always have give an item to the buyer.

I bought a ton of collectible cards when I was in middle school. I lost track of the number of times the value of the cards was worth even as much as the price paid for the pack.

Loot boxes are the same dynamic as long as they give something of intrinsic value in the game.

By the logic used by both the AG and this firm, every collectible card system is also gambling.

That includes baseball cards that my '46 Boomer dad grew up collecting.

Valve should mock the crap out of this buy just buying a collection of MTG, Pokemon, baseball cards, Marvel trading cards and random blind bags from 5 and Below, toss them at the jury and say "is this gambling too?"

Sony and Nintendo both had to increase the costs of their consoles once already, and Nintendo is warning that the Switch 2 might have to go up again because the memory situation is getting that bad.

On a grand scale, my gut says that China is doing to us with AI what we did with military spending to the USSR. The way these companies are inefficiently using capital is insane, but what's even crazier is how no one in the financial sector or government is willing to say "you're drunk, go home."

The one saving grace in all of this is that Tesla is dog-fooding their own AI chips, and Musk has hinted that they might declare war on Nvidia in the nearish future. Allegedly, their chips are faster and more energy efficient than Nvidia's because they're specifically designed for AI workloads, particularly in embedded systems like cars and satellites (SpaceX is a fast growing private customer of Tesla here). That could end up shaking up a lot of things if it works out.

It's only $175B.

We were going to spend that much on debt over the next ~3 weeks anyway.

That's the USA in 2026 for you.

A few major things Sony has going for them:

1. Large install base (~92M according to Gemini).
2. More powerful than the Switch 2.
3. Way more relevant than XBox.
4. Microsoft is starting to have no choice but to target PS5; Gears of War Reloaded and Halo Combat Evolved Remaster are two major examples.
5. Nintendo is struggling really hard to not push the Switch 2 to $475-$500 which is a really bad price point for them.

Seriously, Sony would have to be just stupid to push a PS6 any time soon when they could just double down on content for the PS5.

Their wording specifically sounds like they're not working on tools where you can "prompt your way into a movie," but rather tools that are designed to act as a force multiplier on creatives' labor.

I saw a demo video involving anime about a year ago. The tool basically allowed a single artist to draw out their animation and then tell the model to go through frame-by-frame and clean up rough edges and stuff like that. Basically grunt work that low-paid artists in Korea might do for creators in Japan.

That's the vibe I'm getting here.

If Meta ever lied to a federal agent WRT being able to answer a subpoena or a search warrant, that's a felony.

So if there's merit to these claims, and a lot of cases went dead because Meta was lying its ass off to the government, a WHOLE LOT of people at Meta are looking at getting swept away in a sea of indictments if they choose to act.

The real threat here is that AI will get good enough that producers, directors and writers can work together to achieve their artistic vision without actors. That's very different from business people vibe coding a bunch of insecure spaghetti code garbage. In this case, I'm sympathetic, but not nearly as much as other industries because actors have always been just a cost of allowing creatives upstream of them in the industry to realize their vision.

If we go to war with China, we'll have to rely on companies like Anduril, not Raytheon, to supply our military.

Anduril and other startups focus on engineering systems and weapons that can be built with civilian factories, not highly specialized factories that can't scale.

BTW, that's how we won WWII. We didn't produce systems that were capability-at-any-cost. Engineers had to design systems that could be built at civilian factories because that's where the scalability has always been.